


mustard seeds

by suganii (feints)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Pining, Pining With Visual Metaphors, and everyone is happy and nothing hurts, i love hirugami and hoshiumi sm okay ah, this fic is like if soulmate aus and hanahaki aus had a lovechild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:02:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24511246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feints/pseuds/suganii
Summary: In an AU where your soulmark only manifests outwardly when you’ve grown close, Sachirou examines the words snaking up the underside of his arm and sees a confirmation of the truth he has only ever kept to himself.
Relationships: Hirugami Sachirou & Hoshiumi Kourai, Hirugami Sachirou/Hoshiumi Kourai
Comments: 2
Kudos: 100





	mustard seeds

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was largely borne from reading one too many hanahaki disease fics, and a strong desire to see a hanahaki fic that for once ended happily. Then, chapter 393 came out, and it sort of wrote itself.
> 
> Beta-ed as always by the lovely [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elleskandal/pseuds/elleskandal). Thank you so much for your support, and your willingness to look this piece over for me. I couldn't ask for a better friend than you! <3

_“In all beginnings dwells a magic force, for guarding us and helping us to live.”_

_-Hermann Hesse_

-

A soulmark, Sachirou’s mother tells him, is like a garden _._

It starts as a single blossom, taking root in your chest, burying into feelings raw, barely seeded and growing upward, growing outward. Everyone has one, nestled in the hollows between their rib cages, waiting to be watered, but not everyone necessarily lives long enough to see their words. It can take _years_ before words finally manifest on your skin. Some can wait whole lifetimes until the person whose marks they carry are gone, ships going bump in the night.

Even then, Sachirou’s mother tells him it might not always come as a relief. _It is a garden growing in your chest_ , she says like a sigh, _and sooner than later it will need sunlight._ _Words can imprint into your skin like you’re being choked_ , she says, _though not always_. Hers had felt like a particularly strong pinch, the words etching themselves onto her hip bones. A soulmark represents life, something growing just out of sight, buried under and sprouting only in its time.

Whichever way it comes, when the words appear, the world will fracture, and it will feel like _finally_ , like _of course_ and _yes_.

 _At_ _least_ , his mother laughs, tucking him more comfortably against her side, _that was how I felt when I asked your father to marry me_. There were flowers growing in her chest too, and when Sachirou traces the kanji of his father’s name on her hip bone, he’s reminded of sunflowers, of bright yellow petals as warm as the star they’re named for.

It suits his father, he thinks, that he’d be associated with such a flower. He wonders what his soulmate’s would say of him.

 _How do you know, mother_? He turns wide eyes to her, feeling his heart too big for his chest, the world so impossibly big for his small body. _How do you know when you’ve met them?_

His mother gently takes his hands in hers, interlocking their fingers together as she hums in answer, silent for a while. _You don’t_ , she finally answers. _The gods do not always make their ways known. But whether your soulmate is a sibling, a friend, or a lover, the role they will play in your life will be indispensable._

_Perhaps that is all we need, Sachirou. Keep your heart open, and in time, you will make that connection._

Sachirou nods, locking the words away in his mind. He thinks a soulmate would be nice, like something out of a fairytale only it’s true.

He listens attentively as his mother weaves the tale like a bedtime story, his eyes eventually growing sleepy at the sound. Just before sleep takes him completely, he makes a promise to himself: to make his soulmark bloom before Shou-nee or Nii-san do. He thinks it might not be too hard a task.

But time passes, and he forgets his mother’s words. Or rather, he puts them aside; a soulmark is just a tale, like _Okina_ or _Kintarou,_ and he’s met no one else with words that simply engrave themselves on their skin, not even Shou-nee or Nii-san. Besides, he doesn’t need a confirmation from the universe that he has found fulfillment, or connection, or _happiness_.

Happiness is a fleeting thing, anyway. There are better things to build, and foundations that really, truly last. Like his siblings and his father before him, there is a destiny in front of him, and it’s all in his hands. Sachirou wants to be concrete, he wants to be a mountain, immovable. He wants to be a star, _just_ like them, and he knows if he just tries harder, he can make it work. He has to.

So Sachirou settles into a routine; like roles exchanging hands, he practices, pushing himself harder, faster, _better_. This is his life now: amassing volleyball coaching books like assignments, inhaling his food with washed down bottles of water before practicing during breaks, and blocking volleyballs until his fingers are cracked and bleeding. He stocks up on tape, and purchases recordings of rival matches to watch late into the night. It works.

Until it doesn’t.

Until even the very sight of a volleyball makes a pit open up in his stomach.

Until the day when his blood smears against stone, his knuckles tearing open as if in penance, red blooming from the backs of fingers that will never be strong enough or firm enough. Never good enough. He will _never_ succeed.

Sachirou tastes bile in the back of his throat, bitter and stinging. And, like out of a dream, there is a strong breeze, and a seagull’s cry—his hand wrenched away, a scratchy young voice. A hand grasps his, and the world tilts on its axis, shuddering, fracturing. Suddenly, he feels like a little boy again, missing the warmth of his mother’s arms, and he feels untethered, unmoored, like the boy who holds him is the only person keeping his feet on the ground.

He takes a breath, suddenly, desperately, his throat choking with words he’d so long held back. Just saying the words aloud makes him feel dirty, vulnerable and ashamed, even as red drips onto the ground like the tears that pour down his cheeks.

Later he will realise the enormity of his arrogance. He had thought he was already a wall, standing tall and certain against the mountains that bracket their tiny town in Nagano, when Sachirou is really a mere stone in the garden.

At that moment though, he is just a boy, overwhelmed with feelings too heavy for his shoulders to carry and tired of all the things he fears he can’t achieve. All it takes is a sentence to induce a paradigm shift, deceptively simple words that bring Sachirou crashing back down to earth.

“Why not just quit?”

The words bounce in his head like an echoing chamber, and he finds himself mouthing the words, trying not to shudder away from the shape of them in his mouth. It feels like betrayal.

It feels like hope.

His feet shuffle on solid earth, and he can feel something growing inside him. In the hollows carved out in his chest, his heart beats, seeds burrowing into deep soil.

That night, he merely flops onto his bed, strangely restless. As he turns onto his side, listening to the hum of nightlife outside, he recalls the way the sun had reflected off of the housetops of their tiny town below, and the way his skin had itched underneath his shirt. His fingers had trembled ever so slightly, little tremours running under his skin; the open wound on his right hand had stung he knew, but it was as if from a distance, as though it wasn’t quite part of him. It was the shock of a warm touch that had brought his extremities into sharp awareness, as the boy had taken his hand in his own, cradling Sachirou’s knuckles ever so gently, applying antiseptic and tape while Sachirou sat, tense, beside him. His tongue had poked out between his lips while he concentrated, his mouth moving with words Sachirou couldn’t for the life of him remember.

Instead, Sachirou recalls how he had found his lips curling upwards, almost without his permission at the other boy’s kindness. He had felt fragile, but no longer like he was about to break. When the other boy had finished, he had cut a silhouette, standing in the light, his white mane of hair gleaming, his shadow falling over Sachirou’s.

Like a sunflower. No, like something else, _something_ that stays on the tip of his tongue, just beyond his reach.

 _Hoshiumi Kourai_ , that was his name. Kourai-kun. He was a strange sight, one that Sachirou couldn’t understand.

In the following days, Sachirou finds himself looking for him at lunch instead of heading straight to the locker room for once. There’s something sour at the back of his throat, a sloop in his shoulders when he doesn’t at all manage to spot him. He finds himself searching for that short head of hair in the hallways between classes, trying in vain to single his figure out from the crowd. During practice, he’s distracted, his gaze trailing after Kourai as he flits around like a tiny bird to pick up stray balls and passes around water bottles with dainty fingers.

His throat tightens when Kourai meets his gaze, but he doesn’t look away. He doesn’t approach him either. He doesn’t know what he’d even say to him, some new kind of wonder that he was. But there is a bright, happy spark that flares in his chest; an odd itch as something brushes against his rib cage when he finally manages to catch Kourai outside of practice, tossing a volleyball over and over against the wall behind one of the school gyms, and he thinks, he wants more. It hasn’t— _he_ hasn’t—felt anything like it.

It’s a scary thing, an exciting thing. His heart beats like a hummingbird, anticipating— _what_ , exactly? he doesn’t know—and Sachirou, after observing him silently, spying his lunch unopened and uneaten on the grass for days in a row, makes a decision to approach him at last. He tries not to make his frustration plain on his face as he mentally berates his eating habits; doesn’t Kourai know the importance of physical conditioning?

Holding his fists loosely by his sides, he calls Kourai over, his mouth opening of his own accord to strike a deal he’d only half-formed in his head with the boy.

He hopes it doesn’t sound as awkward as it does in his head. The thing is, he thinks they might come to an understanding. He’d like to practice with Kourai, but the boy surely knows, it is absolutely necessary for an athlete—

“I’m just. . . not very hungry yet,” Kourai admits, his eyes flitting briefly to his admittedly sad-looking bento lunch.

Sachirou shakes his head.

“Eat anyway,” Sachirou cajoles him, offering his own lunchbox of onigiri. “You might not feel it now, but you’ll get hungry soon.”

When Kourai captures his gaze, Sachirou’s breath catches in his throat. The boy is bearing down on him with a gaze as fierce as though he were two metres tall, and for all that he looks about as intimidating as a baby bird, he looks _down_ on Sachirou. It’s only the second time in his life that Sachirou has ever felt so small. “You’ll practice with me, really? You promise?”

Kourai doesn’t ask him why, even when Sachirou himself doesn’t quite understand the reason behind why he extends his offer. His logic doesn’t square up with this boy; nevertheless, he nods, and speaks the words into existence. “Promise.”

Kourai’s fingers slot into his, and Sachirou wonders briefly, if this is what a sunflower tastes like. There is something reassuring about his presence; he makes Sachirou feel _safe_.

And so it begins. For the first time in a long time, Sachirou starts to share his lunch break with someone, and _something_ that is not an empty court, not his own angry breaths. Kourai keeps his ball in one hand as he munches down on his food, to Sachirou’s slight bafflement. When asked though, Kourai merely grins.

“I need this ball to feel close like a friend if I ever want to get better, don’t you think?” His eyes narrow as he examines Sachirou’s fingers critically. “I’m not going to be left behind.”

He pronounces the words so simply even though that too, is something revolutionary to Sachirou. He can’t remember the last time, if ever, he thought a ball could be friendly, not to him. Kourai is continually coming up with ways to surprise him, and Sachirou finds himself hard-pressed to turn away. So he doesn’t.

Days roll onward, a passage that lengthens into weeks, and then months, and Sachirou and Kourai become Sachirou-and-Kourai in increments, a process of getting to know each other by degrees. Sachirou learns that Kourai is competitive about everything, even about him, and it no longer pricks his side like it used to, to his eventual acceptance. Kourai learns about Sachirou’s dog, Haru, and the one time she had a fever and he had to take her to the vet. He had listened quietly then, observing the way the vet’s assured hands had administered pain relief, and then medicine. It would be an image that lodged stubbornly within his mind, and although he’s had it locked away and deep, he finds himself opening up to Kourai without much hesitation. The boy has seen him at his lowest after all and reached out a hand; he takes Sachirou’s secrets freely, what is one more?

Kourai tells him that he hates being looked down on, that he thinks there’s nothing worse in the world. Sachirou tells him that he has a soft spot for nursing after sick animals sometimes, that Shou-nee had helped him build a nest once. Sachirou would never tell him though how Kourai had looked like a fledgling then, about ready to shed its down feathers when he’d changed Sachirou’s world forever, and how Sachirou would never forget the expression on his face. Kourai’s height complex runs deep, and Sachirou doesn’t blame him in the least. The world will never be kind to players of Kourai’s ilk.

Sachirou watches him, and yearns. Something is sprouting, taking root in his chest and it is a lightness sinking deep until he is all but heady on the feeling. It is not a heavy thing, not at first. At first, he hardly acknowledges its existence, besides the occasional ticklish itch when tiny vines begin to creep along his lungs and he has to take an abrupt gasp of air, feeling _something_ nesting in his chest and having to hold himself until the feeling passes.

Soon, the rest of middle school passes by in a rush of matches and volleyball, in a blink. In all that time, Kourai stays on the sidelines, not even given a uniform.

Then they graduate, enter Kamomedai, and Sachirou-and-Kourai submit their volleyball club applications together. Like Shou-nee, and Nii-san before her, Sachirou makes first string easily in his first year, but there’s no doubt in his mind that Kourai will reach him. Every time Sachirou sees him play, he sees the way Kourai flies. He doesn’t look like a baby bird anymore, nursing from his nest; no, he’s a bird in the sky now, and Sachirou is a mere stone in the garden, petals blooming inside him, shaped in what he thinks are stars. Vines are creeping around his lungs and infecting his thoughts until there’s nothing left but admiration, for Kourai who soars when he jumps, poised in the air as though the sky is a tangible thing he can touch. Flowers are growing in this garden, a burst of bitterness in the back of his throat, a spiky aftertaste after every meal, and all Sachirou can do is watch, afraid, delighted, touched. If their coach is as sharp as his reputation makes him out to be, he’ll see the same, sooner rather than later.

He’s proven right. It’s an established rhythm between the two of them now that Sachirou-and-Kourai train together, and the day comes early into their second year as the leaves turn, welcoming spring, when Kourai is substituted in for a practice match. He does not return to the bench for the rest of the match.

Sachirou has practiced serving with him, has talked some senpai into practicing blocking with him. He’s seen Kourai’s improvement. When he successfully pulls off two block-outs in the same set, the coach is the only other one who doesn’t look surprised.

And so Kourai is right there, with him, when they play in the Interhigh. He’s invited to the All-Japan Youth Training Camp alone, without Sachirou, and then he meets his match at the Spring Tournament in the form of another small bird who wanted to fly. He is a _star_ in the making, and the world turns its eye on him.

And Sachirou, well. He has borne a testament to that longing, that hunger so strong his own teammates wither away from it, how strongly Kourai burns. How bright. He’s a bird in flight now, circling over a quaint garden, and Sachirou feels _free._

See, he has always wanted to build things that lasted, things that grew. Once he’d thought his path lay in the way his father’s volleyball slid down his shoulder to his palms, his gaze drawn to the way it spun on the tip of his thumb, balancing perfectly at that singular point of gravity. His father was a star—no, a _sun_ —all warm caresses and a presence that burned if you got too close.

Sachirou is not his father. He no longer wants to be a wall, he wants to be a garden. He wants life he can bury his hands in and the promise of living things that seed, that sprout, that _flower_. If life must be a set of motions, he can make his a happy one.

There’s a sharp bitter taste that stays at the back of his tongue always now, strangely familiar yet not, and he cannot understand it, nor explain, he only knows it exists. There are leaves brushing against his lungs, petals that feel like an itch, and sometimes he has to cough, just to scratch it out.

More and more lately, it weighs on his mind. Sachirou remembers being five, being seven, being eight, and curling into his mother’s side while she weaved her bedtime stories, falling asleep to the sound. _Did you know, Sachirou,_ she would use to say, _about soulmarks?_

He believes her now. He believes a lot of things that he had fallen out of believing, and he wonders if it matters as much as he thinks it does. He wonders, sitting quietly in the cafeteria for the third time that week, as someone addresses Kourai’s height. Kourai rises, to a modest height and towering rage, and Sachirou watches, feeling a pang in his gut. He is a proud bird in a squall, and Sachirou is thoroughly enthralled. He jumps, and the world holds its breath. Flowers shiver in Sachirou’s chest, growing, growing, growing.

What is right to want?

Finally, there is a day into the last few weeks of their final school year when the words find Kourai, like a bitterness flooding Sachirou’s mouth, words snaking up the underside of his arm in an exhale. It feels like _absolutely_ , like _this was meant to be_.

Sachirou traces Kourai’s name with his fingertips, and the taste escapes him until he and Kourai are walking out of school, and his gaze falls to the sidewalk, to the _nanohana_ that grow up from the ground, and he realises. These flowers that grow by sidewalks, in and around potholes and crevices in the earth, around even mere stones in the garden; the harbingers of spring, and hope of better things to come, things that last. It tastes like kindness, like familiarity, like home.

“Say, Kourai-kun,” he begins, “have you ever heard of a soulmark?”

The words find Kourai, just as he’d known they would.

-

**Author's Note:**

>  **nanohana** , or the japanese mustard flower, is a flower that blooms in february/march, and when seen, signifies that spring is near. literally meaning “vegetable flower”, it is a stunning, vibrant yellow in colour, filling areas by roadsides, river banks and open fields. this yellow in buddhism symbolises hope, and life, and is the closest colour to representing daylight. similarly, nanohana represents renewal, sustenance, and the idea that life goes on and the future holds new beginnings. spring is coming, the nanohana proclaims, it is coming again. such small, common flowers, but how lovely, and how many, they sprout.
> 
> (Thank you for reading, it's much appreciated. <3)


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